The invention relates generally to optimization. In particular, this invention provides an expedient technique for maximizing decision benefits for multiple agents and actions by heap sorting.
Many fields involving multiple interacting parameters assign a first series of agents to a second series of actions. This is known to have no perfect solution that can be calculated in real-time for very large data sets. A simple example can be described for two planes and two flight plans. Given the specific speeds and distance of each flight, one objective might include assigning the planes to the flights so that the planes arrive at most nearly the same time. In such a simplistic example, there are only four potential solutions for inspection to determine the optimal.
For practical applications, the potential solutions may lie far beyond the acceptable bounds of real-time computation. For this reason, optimization algorithms are necessary to determine which set of assignments correspond to the best indicators of a beneficial outcome. This type of problem is a subset of integer programming.